Report: China now has 270 million active Android users, growing faster than ever in countryside

If anyone is in the position to know what Chinese netizens get up to online, it’s Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), the nation’s top search engine. Baidu’s newest mobile trends reports reveals lots of details about what people in China are doing with their smartphones and feature phones – but let’s focus on the big picture.

The report shows that China now has 270 million active Android users (in Q3 2013), up from about 130 million at the same period last year.

Notice that the rate of growth of Android uptake is now slowing on average – to about 10 to 13 percent per quarter – but there’s likely still room for plenty of growth as more of China’s poorer citizens abandon their old-timer flip-phones.

Android noobs

Baidu’s report also looked at where these Android newcomers live, to give a picture of socio-economic changes in smartphone adoption across the country. Apparently, most of the Android adopters this year are in China’s slightly smaller ‘second-tier’ cities (nearly 45 percent of them), but the red line on the right side of the graph below indicates that Android is growing faster than before in third-, fourth-tiers cities, as well as China’s countryside.